Playing with Plymouth

If you ever wondered why Fedora and Ubuntu have such nice animated boot screens, let me enlighten you on this subject. They are using Plymouth to achieve this.

If you want to play with this I have some instructions for you to follow but be warned that you should know what you are doing and let me start with summing up some known issues:

All following problems should be solved when Plymouth is finally integrated with OpenRC.

1. Because Plymouth is taking over the control of tty1 it might mess it up. Although they should no longer occur with 0.8.3-r3.Line endings might be messed up.Password typed in tty1 might be not hidden. Switch to another tty to login.2. Plymouth turns on OpenRC’s interactive mode. The workaround is to disable it permanently in /etc/rc.conf.3. Splash might freeze on some stages and not respond immediately.

when you generate a new initramfs notice this line:I: -rw-r–r– 1 root root 4050903 Mar 6 21:04 /boot/initramfs-3.2.0-sabayon.imgthis is the location of the generated initramfs we need to add to the next step.